Ma Phon
1880s
The Hairy Family of Mandalay
people King Bagyidaw PT Barnum Shwe Maung
Few people in Myanmar know of the strange tale of the "hairy family of Mandalay", though they were once world-famous.
The tale started with a hairy boy found in the uplands of Laos who was brought to the Court of Ava by King Bagyidaw (r. 1819-1837) and named Shwe Maung. At least three generations of his family were born with what may have been an extremely rare condition of congenital hypertrichosis, which results in excessive hair growth all over the body.
He and his descendants were patronized and protected by the Burmese kings from the 1820s. They lived at the royal court, where they were educated, and made money by exhibiting themselves to visiting Europeans, until the fall of Mandalay in 1885, when they fled to the forest. Shwe Maung's daughter (Ma Phon) and grandchildren (Maung Po Set and Ma Me) were then shipped to London and Paris where many competed to hire them as circus freaks. The American showman PT Barnum (later of Barnum and Baily's Greatest Show on Earth) won the contract for $100,000 (worth millions in today's money) and billed them as "The Hindoo Hairy Family" and "The Weird Hairy Family of Burmah". They were exhibited as circus freaks in London and then in the US.
Ma Phon died shortly after arriving in Washington in 1888 and is apparently buried there, a long way from home. No one knows what happened to her son Maung Po Set and Ma Me - they seem to have vanished in America or perhaps while trying to return home to Burma.
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